[NickM]

The trouble is that making progress in leaps is often mutually exclusive with being productive in the short term. It’s hard to think big and plan long-term when you’re constantly overwhelmed with what’s in front of you.

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport talks about this trade-off extensively and provides interesting points of reference where real famous historical figures achieved incredible things in ways that would seem slow and lazy by modern standards.

[taeric]

But that is part of my point. This is not actually the conflict. Progress by leaps is often only possible in places that are also making repeated incremental progress.

It is tempting to think of this in terms of sports. As an easy example, home runs make larger impacts for teams that are good at getting people on bases. Of course, you can argue that baseball has a ceiling on how much you can make from a single home run which is not true for most businesses.

But even sports somewhat miss one of the main things that is hard to communicate. What feels like small progress is often needed just to stay afloat. I suppose the sports nature of it would be that you have an offense and a defense, usually. In business, that daily short term progress would be the defense.

It is frustrating, because we do want to focus on the big ideas. But so many of the big ideas needed a TON of little ideas around them to be viable. And by nature, when we discuss one as a thing that we want, we almost necessarily ignore the other. We can really only focus on one thing at a time.